Let’s call this what it is – it’s voter suppression; my own thoughts echo that of Chris Matthews HERE.

And I want to be clear – Rick Scott is a real asshole and I don’t mean that in a nice way.

There are currently three lawsuits against the state of Florida for its voter suppression efforts relative to purging active voters.  A federal judge has already ruled against the law that tried to restrict voter registration in Florida; we’ve shared that HERE.  In Rick Scott’s first voter purge – 98.4% of all the voters who were sent letters telling them they couldn’t vote were eligible voters (source).

From Think Progress HERE:

Election officials were told to expect a revised lists of voters for possible removal in two to three weeks but “not later than October 15, 2012.”

The presentation outlines a proceedure to “update” their flawed purge list by cross-checking it against a federal Department of Homeland Security database (SAVE). This task is apparently being done by hand and has not been completed since there is “no established automated process yet.”

The Florida Department of State acknolwedges that, in many cases, the federal SAVE database will not establish definitively whether or not someone is a U.S. citizen. In that case, they are directing election officials to mail them letters to “re-affirm registration status” and “remind them of eligibility requirements and that it is illegal to be registered and vote when someone is not a U.S. citizen.”

And CBS adds more detail HERE:

Chris Cate, a spokesman for Detzner, said Florida will create yet another non-U.S. citizen list by once again comparing driver’s license information with voter rolls and then running the names through a federal immigration database. A similar effort last year yielded 180,000 names but state officials later called that list obsolete and said they wouldn’t use it.

Cate, however, could not say if this new list would be produced and distributed to election supervisors prior to the November election.

“We will work as promptly as we can, but we realize that this is a process that is going to extend beyond the general election,” Cate said.

The one limitation on this new process, however, is that Florida must have the identifying number used by the Department of Homeland Security in order to access the federal database. The state was only able to double-check 1,700 of the 2,625 names it initially came up with because it did not have the unique identifier.

Comments

comments